Getting Notifications on Your iPhone 4S

When you stop to think about it, a smartphone is smart because of all the things it can communicate. Your iPhone 4S has a Notification Center that gives you an at-a-glance, timely view of everything you want to keep on top of: new e-mails, texts, the current temperature, appointments and reminders, Twitter tweets, and more.

But although it’s useful to keep tabs on all this stuff, you don’t want to be hit over the head with the information, thus distracting you from whatever else you’re doing on the iPhone. So Apple delivers notifications in an unobtrusive manner: They appear as banners at the top of the screen:

The banner disappears after a few seconds until you actively choose to view the notification. When you’re ready, you summon the Notification Center just by swiping down from the top of the screen.

You can also choose which notifications you see. Tap Settings—>Notifications and then tap the notifications you want to see. What’s more, you can customize the way the notifications you do want to see appear. By way of example, in Settings, tap Reminders under the list of apps and widgets that you can include in Notification Center. You can decide whether reminders should appear in the Notification Center and indicate whether you want to see just a single reminder item, up to five reminders or up to ten of these items. Next, choose an alerts style: whether such reminder notifications appear as one of those banners at the top of the screen that disappears automatically or as an alert that requires your response before you can do anything else. Lastly, you get to decide whether to receive reminder notifications when your phone is locked: